Cyrus Shahabi

Cyrus Shahabi is a professor of computer science and electrical engineering and the director of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California. He was also the chief technology officer and co-founder of a USC spin-off and an In-Q-Tel portfolio company, Geosemble Technologies, which was acquired in June 2012.

He received his B.S. in computer engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1989 and then his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the University of Southern California in May 1993 and August 1996, respectively. He authored two books and more than two hundred research papers in the areas of databases, geographic information systems (GIS) and multimedia.

Shahabi has received funding from several agencies such as the NSF, National Institute of Justice, National Aeronautics and Science Administration, National Institutes of Health, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Air Force Research Laboratory, and Department of Homeland Security as well as several industries such as Chevron, Google, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NCR and NGC. He is currently on the editorial board of the VLDB Journal and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. Shahabi is a recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery Distinguished Scientist award and the U.S. Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He was the recipient of U.S. Vietnam Education Foundation (VEF) faculty fellowship award in 2011 and 2012, an organizer of the 2011 National Academy of Engineering “Japan-America Frontiers of Engineering” program, an invited speaker in the 2010 National Research Council (of the National Academies) Committee on New Research Directions for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and a participant in the 2005 National Academy of Engineering “Frontiers of Engineering” program.